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Pregnancy in the Sea Org... Coerced abortion

11. While at the base,
I knew of several
instances of staff getting pregnant and being coerced to get an
abortion. Some instances were relayed to me by the
victims themselves and others were relayed to me by another.
In two instances, the couples to keep their child despite
extensive course of ethics method and thus were banished to
a failing Class IV organization. In every instance they had
to go through ethics handling designed to prevent them that
it would be far more advantageous to Scientology and the Sea
Org for each of them to have an abortion. Some of these
women went through extensive pressure methods to convince
them to have an abortion. The severity of the Ethics
handling was directly proportional to the prospective
mother's desire and insistence to keep the child. I myself
got pregnant in 1993 and gave up my child due to my greatly
misguided obligation and dedication to the Sea Org.

13. I told the Medical Officer (Martine Collins) of
my pregnancy. She immediately went into action to arrange for my abortion.
She told me, that I would naturally be expected to pay for
it myself, since it was considered Out Ethics to get
pregnant. (Out Ethics in Scientology simply means your
reasoning facilities are no longer thinking in a direction
designed to promote Scientology and must be corrected).

15. The day after I returned from my abortion, I was
weak and sore and had cramps. I proposed a light work load that I felt I
could accomplish. My Senior, Megan Rae, refused this and instead gave me
a target that literally would have taken about many people to accomplish
in one day. I attempted to let her know what an impossible task it was
and that her order must have been a joke. I soon learned that she was
completely serious. My obvious protest on this was met with the barked
threat, "If you use this
abortion cycle to dramatize inefficiency and thus not accomplish your
production targets, I will have you comm-eved." A commev is
short for Committee of Evidence. It is one of the severest
Ethics actions you can level at someone.

23. The following are the brief stories of women I knew who had abortions after
undergoing coercive ethics sessions and being threatened with exile to a
Class IV organization. Because this topic wasn't something
that we were supposed to talk about, for the sake of Public
Relations, within and outside the Base to protect the women
involved from retribution and to preserve their privacy, I
have not given their names.

42.
Approximately 1½ years before I left, a new rule came out
stating that if you got pregnant, you had to either get an
abortion, which was heavily pushed, or leave. The rule
had previously been that if you got pregnant,
you had to get an abortion or be sent to a small
and failing lower organization where you had to
fend for yourself and your baby. I had to
handle any staff that disagreed with this new
rule. I myself disagreed with it because I
wanted children and was told I would be able to
have them when I was first recruited.
However, I never said anything for fear of
getting into trouble. I got to the point of
being suicidal because I was so unhappy, but I
never said anything because I would have gotten
into big trouble and been looked down upon.
[...]

«46. It took a lot less time for me to leave
because they didn't want any of the other staff to know I was
pregnant, so they were trying to get me out quick. A staff
member from the Religious Technology Center (The Sea Org's
highest organization) came up to me one day while I was in the
process of routing out and asked me what I was doing. I told
him that I was pregnant and leaving and he said to me "Oh, too
late for an abortion?" I personally knew of three other girls who got pregnant and were convinced to
get abortions. One was my sister-in-law who was 16 weeks pregnant when she was
convinced to abort her child although she was strongly against it. My
mother told my sister and I that it was good that
she got an abortion.

15. In late 1991,
my wife Monika became
pregnant and although we were elated, she was ordered to abort
the child. The reason for the abortion order is that Sea
Org members were not allowed to have children. The order
devastated both my wife and me. Our dedication as Sea Org
members clashed violently with our intentions as parents and
we went through a personal nightmare with me opposing it, to
no avail. She got the abortion and afterwards she was not
the same. She was devastated at the impact of what she did
and that was when she told me she wanted to leave.

Because the attitude among some Sea Org
leadership appears to be that children hinder adults from
performing their vital assignments, researchers should not
be surprised to learn of pressures that Sea Org women felt
to either abort pregnancies or give-up children for
adoption. My 1987 informant told me that when Sea Org
operated on ships during the mid 1970s, women knew that they
were not allowed to raise children on the vessels.
Consequently, they experienced pressure to have abortions.

6. She went on to tell me that the spirit
doesn't enter the baby's body until the baby is born. She
made the point that all I would be "killing" is a piece of
meat essentially. We discussed this for a couple of days and
she showed me definitions in the L. Ron Hubbard Technical
Dictionary to persuade me to have an ABORTION.

(n) Defendants had engaged in fraud in
not telling Plaintiff, at the time of his recruitment, about
Hubbard's attitude toward children as being "expensive
inconveniences" and that Scientology Sea Org staff members are
routinely ordered to
have abortions because children interfere with "production" and
require "family time"

Kelly spoke of a
time when Church staff were forbidden to have children
because there was insufficient room in the Flag Land
Base nursery. Former Messengers have said that children were
completely prohibited at Gilman Hot Springs as well. Abortions were common.